Deadly Good

Apple's iNett Gets Employees Back To Work Fast

Conan O'Brien has taken Apple's public relations nightmare centered around factory working conditions at Foxconn in China and turned the subject into a satirical comedy skit.

The focus of his humor is aimed at a cluster of worker suicides that took place at the Foxconn factory last year. Too soon?

While there is nothing funny about human tragedy or worker suicides, comedy can be more effective at drawing attention to obvious absurdities, than in-depth news reports that quickly get buried among the daily media noise.

Foxconn actually placed nets around their factory buildings as an attempt to protect against employee suicides. That's the truth. But it was clearly a temporary and mostly comical solution to a far deeper problem.

Should Foxconn just build better nets so we can all have more iStuff even faster? I hope we all agree on the answer to that question.

I suggest that Apple and Foxconn immediately deploy a concern team and get dead serious about improving working conditions for their most valuable assets. But please — don't lose focus on the message and get distracted by trying to kill the messenger.